[The
following is the text of a lecture given by Ian Johnston in LBST 401 at
Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo (now Vancouver Island University). This
text is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in part,
without permission and without charge, provided the source is
acknowledged--released October 1999]

Any overall
introduction to eighteenth century Europe might well begin by acknowledging that
the period was immensely complex (a statement true enough about any century).
And yet there has for a long time existed a tendency to subsume the century
under a convenient label which suggests some prevailing or ruling idea or
preoccupation. In fact, no period of our history has attracted so many
simple-sounding labels. The Eighteenth Century or parts of it, for example, have
been called such things as The Augustan Age, The Age of Elegance, The Age of
Exuberance, The Augustinian Age, The Age of Reason, The Age of Revolution, and
no doubt several others. These labels, in one way or another highlight important
features of the time, but to the extent that any one of them suggests a single
determining characteristic it is misleading.

What we can
safely say, I think, is that the 18th century is that time when Western
Civilization underwent the irrevocable transition into the modern age and,
perhaps without fully realizing it, became firmly committed to the modern
industrialized liberal capitalistic enterprise, which fundamentally transformed
the lives of most of the citizens who call themselves Western Europeans or North
Americans.

As the 18th
century opened there was a much more confident air throughout Europe than there
had been a century before. The religious wars had largely concluded, and
although there was considerable religious tension and oppression, nevertheless
the wholesale slaughter over religious questions had for the most part stopped.
In France, Louis XIV was at the height of his glory and power, expanding French
influence throughout Europe and overseas. In England, the business class had
twice asserted its authority by getting rid of the monarch—once by a civil war and an execution
and a second time (in 1688) by forcing him to leave the country without
bloodshed. England was beginning to establish profitable overseas colonies, its
trade and industrialization were well ahead of most of the rest of Europe, its
explorers were opening up hitherto unheard of parts of the world, and the nation
had come a long way from the relatively uninfluential country it had been one
hundred years before. Holland, too, was a thriving mercantile state. In much of
Europe there was a general feeling of expansion of growing power and wealth—the spirit best expressed in the
Baroque music characteristic of the turn of the century.

Contributing
enormously to this sense of confidence was the continuing influence of Newton,
whose Principia (published in the second half of the 17th century) seemed
to many to provide conclusive proof of the order in the universe and, by
extension, of the divine benevolence of God. Newton's achievement not only
apparently resolved a problem thousands of years old (the architecture of the
solar system) but also established a method which, it seemed, would yield ever
more promising and useful results.

By the end of
the eighteenth century the mood had changed dramatically. With the outbreak of
the French Revolution in 1789, all Europe seemed gripped by revolutionary fervor
and its countervailing anti-revolutionary panic and repression. The major cities
had become familiar with crime to an extent unheard of before (except during
civil war). And for all the wealth generated from what was now an overseas
empire and from the rapidly accelerating industrialization of life and the
growth of manufacturing, poverty on the farm and in the proliferating cities was
acute. The Napoleonic Wars with which the century concluded ushered in what was
arguably the first modern warfare, with huge national citizen armies fighting
immense battles through long and very bloody campaigns.

Whatever
created all this change, by the end of the century Europe faced some
astonishingly modern problems and was committed to a way of life very different
from what had been common only a few decades before. Increasing numbers of
people now lived in the huge cities, rather than in small agricultural
communities, and society was beginning to think of itself along class lines
(rather than in terms of organic communities). Central governments had increased
enormously in power, and people now increasingly looked to them rather than to
any parochial authority to deal with the obvious and serious social problems.

What I want
to call attention to today is a particular way of looking at a central problem
faced by the 18th century, a problem to which it turned its attention again and
again, which it was unable to resolve finally, and which it passed onto the
nineteenth century and to us. For we are still dealing with it.The
problem, simply put, can be stated this way: Once the traditional small
agricultural community is destroyed and people live in different circumstances,
how can we hold them together in peace and security, conferring a significance
on people's lives, individually and collectively? Where will we find a suitable
basis for social and political life?

I would like
to address the problem by redescribing it in the following terms: The problem
the 18th century faced was the loss of ritual meaning to life, and one of their
most urgent concerns was to find some means of replacing what had been lost. Let
me explain what I mean by this rather odd-sounding phrase.

The
Ritual Basis of Communal Life

What does
this mean? Well, speaking quite generally, I would claim that the small
traditional agricultural community was held together, more than anything else,
by shared rituals. These were the common public ceremonial actions which
everyone who belonged to a particular community recognized as important and
participated in as the chief means of declaring who they were in that community.

The origin of
ritual is much debated, but it seems to have something to do with an attempt by
the human community to deal with what its members do not understand or most
fear. The ritual act, rather like magic, is a group ceremony designed to mediate
between the human community and the forces which most threaten it, especially
the forces of nature. Thus, rituals are commonly associated with agricultural
events (ploughing and seeding, harvesting) and with those times of life when
nature most clearly interferes with our attempts to deal with our fears about it
(especially concerning sex, higher realities, madness, and death).

Rituals are
traditional, handed down from one generation to another. They do not have to be
understood in any rational sense. They express a community's shared response to
a common anxiety or sense of joy. And in carrying out the ritual, the total
community expresses itself, for everyone has a part (not all equally important,
perhaps, but everyone is equally a participant).

The rituals
may be frequent and routine (like a weekly church service) or they may be major
celebrations (e.g., an annual public holiday to honour the patron saint of the
community or a wedding or a harvest festival). They may be a public
manifestation of a personal loss (e.g., the death rituals before burial) or some
form of lengthy initiation (as in a courtship process). In all their
manifestations they share the same characteristics: ceremonial, public,
hierarchical, repetitive, traditional, and communal.

Rituals of
this sort serve to hold the community together, to reinforce everyone's sense of
belonging together, to remind everyone of their mutual interdependency and the
uniqueness of their shared community. A small group of people held together in
such a way will all know each other, will share a common sense of belonging and
understanding, and will thus have ways to deal with inherent tensions which
arise, without recourse always to courts and police and impartial judges. For
instance, communities held together in this way often require few codified laws,
little formal education about what the world means, and no arguments about
rights, since the basic rule, as old as Roman Law, is simply if it's not the
custom it's not the law (non mos, non ius). The traditional ways
preserved in rituals contain the means to resolve such difficulties as may
arise.

Rituals also
enshrined a person's and a community's sense of past, present, and future,
assuring permanence and a continuing significance to the way people lived their
lives. The rituals carried that assurance, and the memorials basic to many of
those rituals (the memorials in the church, in the graveyard, in the stories of
the community, and in the unvarying details of the various ceremonies) conferred
significance on mundane lives by placing them in a context which transcended
time.

Finally, and
this may seem a bit odd, but these rituals, time bound and restricting as they
may be, were a great source of a sense of freedom—not freedom for the individual, but
freedom for the community itself. The ritualistic basis of life put all the
important things that went on in the hands of the community itself, and its
ritual practices gave it a unique character. The poor artisan might not be free
in our sense of the word, but he might sense a more important freedom, that of
being a fully recognized, integral part of a free community, which by and large
ran its own affairs.

These are
cursory generalizations about a very complex topic, but I think I've said enough
to make the point that the social cohesion of a group held together by rituals
of the sort described generally above is something very strong and very
effective. And no one who lived in such a community and shared the vital faith
in its traditions ever needed to read about what the purpose of life was—that was clear enough in the
ritualistic rhythms basic to all elements of every day life.

The
Loss of Ritual

I want to
argue that one way to approach a major issue in the 18th century is to recognize
the problem arising from the loss of this traditional community whose is life
organized around local rituals. And once the ritual basis of life for so many
people ceased to have any vital connection with their daily lives, certain key
problems inevitably arose. I don't want to spend too much time speculating about
what might have so weakened the organic, ritualistic community, but there are a
few obvious factors.

The breaking
apart of the Christian Church into Roman Catholic and many different Protestant
factions was obviously a key element. This had occurred in the previous two
centuries and might not have been decisive but for other things. It's important
to recognize, however, that the loss of religious unanimity in a community can
be disastrous for any shared ritual sense of life, since there will now be
competing ritual practices (often quite hostile to each other)—so while within each group there may be
continuing attempts to invest all of life's routine and extraordinary events
with the traditional ritualistic ceremony, that will no longer be shared,
perhaps with disastrous results (rather like, for example, the Orangemen
parading through Catholic sections of Belfast to celebrate the Battle of the
Boyne).

Equally
important was the growing wealth, which placed enormous strains on the
traditional interdependencies of the organic community. Many traditionally very
important people were no longer the greatest sources of wealth in the community.
An enterprising middle-class business entrepreneur (who as often as not might be
a dissenting Protestant) could begin to amass wealth at unheard of rates and
build himself and his family a life out of all traditional proportion to his
station (especially a home life out of the public space). And a person who was
developing an increasingly commodious private space was far less likely to see
his life primarily in terms of public responsibilities and public ceremonies.

Truly
disastrous to the small community, however, was the forcible removal of the
poorest farmers from the common land, the enclosing of the small estates and
shared grazing lands, so that more efficient, larger farms could be made out of
the consolidation. Again, the enclosure movement had been going on for some
time, but as the technological improvements in agriculture accelerated and the
capitalistic drive grew stronger, more and more common lands were taken away
from the agricultural poor, and their life became impossible to sustain. Forced
away from the community, they went elsewhere, increasingly to the large cities
(where they formed a labour pool available to the developing industrial
revolution).

Accelerating
this attack on traditional ritual was Protestantism, which was naturally opposed
to many of them because they were associated with the traditional Roman Catholic
faith and because Protestantism in many of its varieties emphasized an
inwardness in religious practices, private prayer rather than public
celebration. Even now, many of the best known remaining ritual public
celebrations are much more common in Catholic communities than in Protestant
ones (e.g., Mardi Gras, Fasching, saints' days).

But the coup
de grace to the small organic community was the population explosion in Europe,
which started in the second half of the 18th century and has been going on ever
since. For some reason, which historians are still debating, the population of
Europe began in increase at a staggering rate (better food, better clothing,
improvements in medicine—these and other factors have been
suggested as major causes). This increase was confined to Europe, and its effect
there was staggering. All of a sudden there were more people than a particular
community could handle. They had no place to go but to move out, usually to the
cities and many eventually overseas to the colonies. The resulting poverty and
dislocation was almost overwhelming, socially disruptive, and politically very
dangerous. All of a sudden there were thousands and thousands of people for whom
society had no place, and Europe began to experience what we have become very
familiar with since—the displaced person, the rootless
drifter, the refugee, the person who calls no place home.

It might be
worth remarking that up to this point the writers we have been dealing with have
all, to a greater or lesser extent, been closely associated with a particular
community. They have derived a sense of pride and identity from belonging to
that community: Socrates, Hildegard, Shakespeare, Dante, and others. Many of the
writers we are now dealing with, however, are deracinated, constantly on the
move, filled with a sense that they do not belong: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft,
Marx, Nietzsche, and scores of Romantic poets.

This
population explosion took time to register its effect, especially since there
were no regular or accurate statistical studies to inform people what was going
on. But it, in combination with the other factors, put increasing pressure on
the traditional responses for how one might organize a peaceful community. The
ancient rituals were losing their grip, for the changes revealed only too
clearly their greatest weakness—their inability to deal well with rapid
change. Much psychological and social dislocation was the result. What were
people to do? Where were they to derive a sense of where they belonged, of who
they were, of how they should organize their life? In the ancient traditional
community the answers to such questions had been almost self-evident.

This problem
is well described by a comment from a modern novel in which a character
observes:

Once you
leave the schtetl [the small agricultural village] you're out in the open; it
rains and it snows. It snows history, which means what happens to someone
starts in a web of events outside the personal. (Malamud, The Fixer, p.
314)

Once one
loses the living context of the small organic community, one delivers oneself
over to impersonal forces beyond one's control and beyond one's understanding.
One's life become governed by forces for change—the oppression of history takes over,
and the reassuring certainties of life based on the interpersonal relationships
of the small community disappear in a snowstorm of impersonal forces.

The
Response to this Loss of Ritual

Last year we
examined in some detail two responses to this problem. We looked, for example,
at Montaigne's advice to retire into private life, adhering to the customs of
one's country but placing at the centre of one's life private concerns: food,
books, wine, friends, estates. We did discuss the extent to which one might be
entitled to interpret Montaigne's irony as having a much more subversive intent.
But on the surface, his response in the 16th century already appears to be to
withdraw. The world is too complex, to quarrelsome to engage directly, and too
complex to change.

And then we
turned in Hobbes to a radically new idea, the view that society should be
restructured on rational principles, taking into account the true nature of
human beings (which is presocial, that is, non-communal), turning all rituals
into a codified written agreement enforced by the laws backed up by an
all-powerful sovereign. We could solve the problems of the break down of the
small organic community by building an entire nation on a very different model:
atomized citizens working for their own self-interest in a huge impersonal
state. The personal communal rituals of the traditional community should
be replaced by the rational bureaucracy where the powers of particular offices
stipulated in law as the representatives of the sovereign controlled all public
space. All traditional forms of ritual, of government, of rank, of religion must
give way before this rational reconstruction of society if human beings are to
live in security. What was not explicitly set down in law was no longer binding
(a clear criticism of the effects of all those unwritten laws enshrined in
custom and traditional ritual which are so effective in the small community at
controlling the inhabitants)

Hobbes's work
is revolutionary in a number of ways.First
he placed human beings in a presocial space from which they derive certain
presocial rights (i.e., the individual has certain claims independent of
society, an assumption unlike the Greek notion that outside a community a human
being has nothing). Society is thus, in some way, answerable to the nature and
rights of individuals and must be organized with that in mind.

Second,
Hobbes stressed that society is organized through the rational consent of the
governed. There is no natural hierarchy, since by nature all human beings are
equal. The Commonwealth is neither ordained by God nor an inevitable product of
hallowed tradition. It is, by contrast, an artificial construction designed to
serve the self-interest of its members, all of whom are naturally equal.

Thirdly, the
basis of the artificial construct, the Commonwealth, must be a trade off: the
individual surrenders all his freedom and power to the state in order to gain
back a protected space, which is his to use as he sees fit. This is the famous
concept of negative liberty (private space), a key element in the liberal
tradition—where whatever is not explicitly
forbidden in law the individual is allowed to do.

What holds
society together in Hobbes's Commonwealth is not a shared ritualistic
understanding or tradition but legal obligation in clearly stipulated legal
language. Public life is ruled by contracts which serve the individual's
self-interest. Virtue, in Hobbes's state, is irrelevant (in a traditional
sense); what matters is obedience to the law and a concentration on increasing
one's commodious living (which Hobbes thinks people will pursue anyway, because
of their acquisitive, competitive nature). Hence, Hobbes pays virtually no
attention to educating people for citizenship, since the self-interest and fear
basic to the contract are, he thinks, evident to anyone who thinks about these
things.

The
Influence of Hobbes

While Hobbes'
work was widely condemned and his conclusions and recommendations rejected
(particularly because of his views on religion and on scriptural
interpretation), his method was extraordinary influential. It seemed to promise
a persuasive means of arriving at something that might provide a sufficient
consensus to enable people to construct their personal and social lives on a new
basis. I list below a few obvious points of importance in this regard.

The response
to the breakdown of the community must be a rational reform or reconstruction of
society—reason must replace tradition (because
we can agree about what is reasonable; whereas, our traditions have fractured
into competing systems of belief). The basis for such a reasoned approach to
reform must be an agreement about the nature of human beings outside society,
their rights, their psychology, their needs. On the basis of this vision of
human nature, society must be structured in such as way that it wins the consent
of the governed, because it answers to their needs as human beings.

By starting
with the concept of the individual in a state of nature, as Hobbes had done,
later political thinkers, especially John Locke, stressed the fundamental
equality of human beings in the natural state, an equality which society must
reflect (though what that entailed varied considerably) and their ownership of
certain rights. The state has a responsibility to enshrine these rights and
freedoms for the individual, and the individual has certain clear obligations to
the state. All these points are derived from reason. Tradition plays no role,
unless reason and law explicitly endorse it.

The
Philosophes

In following
a program like this, in one way or another several thinkers owed a great debt to
Hobbes. Many of them rejected his conclusions and some of his assumptions, but
they adopted his overall method of analysis as the basis for the reasoned attack
on the established old order and for the recommendations for required reforms.

Of particular
importance in this continuation of the project launched, in part, by Hobbes, are
the writers and thinkers called the Philosophes, a very influential group of
rational reformers in the latter half of the century. The term refers to a
loosely knit band of intellectuals scattered all over Europe, although mainly
concentrated in France. Most of them were not, strictly speaking, philosophers.
We would probably call them social critics. Inspired by the work of Newton,
Hobbes, and Locke, the philosophes sought to put government, law, religion, and
education on a more rational footing, and they attacked unremittingly and in
many different ways (novels, plays, pamphlets, encyclopedias, letters, journals)
what they perceived were the inherent abuses of the old order, especially in the
Roman Catholic Church and the hereditary nobility. For most of them the
development of science and technology was an important part of this project.Prominent among them were the familiar names of some of
the most famous writers of the second half of the 18th century: Voltaire,
d'Alembert, Gibbon, Holbach, Godwin, Hume, Jefferson, Smith, Kant,
Wollstonecraft.

It is really
important to notice that they were primarily social critics, seeking rational
reforms of existing institutions. They did not have a shared political program
(not until Marx). They did share certain rhetorical devices, a faith in reason
and technology, and a great admiration for certain political figures who seemed
to exemplify precisely the program they wanted for France and England (e.g.,
Jefferson, Washington, Franklin—and the American Revolution generally,
made in the name of self-evident principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, which overthrew tyranny without creating a society all that different
from what it had been before). But they were not political activists in the
sense of sharing a practical sense of how to deal with exiting political
realities, of having a shared revolutionary purpose or program. They may have
had a great sympathy for the hardships of the poor, but they were in no sense
political spokesmen for them (in the sense that they were seeking political
emancipation for the lower orders).

In religious
matters they tended to be deists—those who believed that reason and
faith must be reconciled by making the details of faith accountable to reason
(not a traditional Christian attitude). In general, they were opposed to
Christianity (except as a suitable belief for the poor and the stupid) and to
atheism, although some of them promoted a position extremely close to atheism.
(Note Voltaire's response to a beautiful sunrise "I believe, I believe in
you, God. As for Monsieur the Son and Madame the Mother, that's another matter.)

Nor were they
shallow optimists naively committed to progress. Many of them were cautiously
optimistic, especially about the beneficial effects of science and technology,
but they were not naive utopians. They wanted a society not entirely unlike the
one they lived in, but with more rational organizations and equal justice. Their
rhetoric was often strained (e.g., Voltaire's "strangling the last king in
the guts of the last priest") and some of them pushed materialistic
atheistic science quite far, but they were not violent revolutionaries. They
would have been horrified by the French Revolution, which overwhelmed the
growing zeal for reforms in a tidal wave of bloody upheavals (and which stalled
the reform movements outside of France for a couple of generations, encouraging
a counter-reaction which led to, among other things, a reintroduction of the
Inquisition).

The work of
the European Enlightenment as represented in the work of the philosophes,
however, left an enormously important legacy: the faith that through the
application of reason to social problems, human society could be made more just
and human beings could live happier, more fulfilled lives—the problems created by the break down
of the rituals of the small traditional communities could be alleviated with a
rational commitment to liberty, equality, and representative government; the
application of science and technology to social problems would promote the
happiness of all. This is, briefly put, the grand hope known as the
Enlightenment project—either in its later Marxist or Liberal
manifestations. Our society today still rests on those noble hopes, even if we
are a good deal less optimistic than some of the philosophes.

Rousseau

The most
complex personality of all the philosophes was Jean Jacques Rousseau, probably
the most psychologically compelling character we have met or are going to meet
among the authors we study. Psychologically fascinating, his life is such a
collection of contradictions, that it is often hard to get a firm fix on where
he really stands, especially since so much of his life appears to contradict his
writing:

Rousseau
was a playwright who inveighed against the theatre, a moralist who abandoned
his children, a religious philosopher who changed his confession twice for
dubious reasons, a libertarian who could not get compulsion out of his mind, a
deist who accused his fellow deists of irreligion, a professional celebrant of
friendship who broke with everyone. (Gay, II, 530)

What
complicates these contradictions is that Rousseau was dedicated to a public
personality; he deliberately cultivated a notorious reputation as an impossible
person to get along with, celebrating in public all his idiosyncrasies (for
instance, the famous story of his giving away his children to almost certain
death, which he, more than anyone else, publicized, may not be true).

What is hard
to deny is his influence, for his writing and his life are seen as having, in
one way and another, a decisive influence on everything from the French
Revolution, progressive education, rational morality, Romanticism, to every
major tyranny ever since. He is clearly an enormously complex thinker about whom
it is dangerous to generalize.

Today, by way
of an introduction to Emile, I want to focus on what is a central concern
of a great deal of Rousseau's thinking in his social and political writing,
particularly in Emile. And to clarify that, I'd like to begin by
approaching Rousseau as another writer seeking to solve the problem of the loss
of the organic community. How can we organize life purposefully and meaningfully
in the changed social world of the bourgeoisie (the increasingly affluent
merchant middle class).

Rousseau
clearly owed a lot to Hobbes. But three things about Hobbes's analysis Rousseau
could not accept: for Rousseau Hobbes placed too much oppression in the public
space, held far too pessimistic a view of human nature, and paid far too little
attention to the dangers of commodious living.

Rousseau
holds a much more uncompromising view of liberty than does Hobbes. For Rousseau,
as for Hobbes, to be human is to be naturally free. But he is not willing, as
Hobbes is, to compromise this freedom to create a secure society. Rousseau wants
a society in which the human being retains a freedom equivalent to that he
enjoys in a state of nature. He wants a peaceful citizen who can live in society
and yet feel no loss of liberty, no compromise with social rules. Hobbes, of
course, demanded enforced obedience to the law (even in religious matters) in
the public space. In one's protected private space, one was free to pursue one's
own life (so long as it involved no communal association potentially dangerous
to the state).Rousseau is thus unwilling to
follow Hobbes's solution to sacrifice a good deal of liberty to preserve a
private space, to enshrine negative liberty in the middle of a public space
controlled by an all-powerful sovereign: he wants to retain the full sense of
freedom of a state of nature (it will be a different freedom but it will be
total).

Rousseau is
unwilling to see human beings as Hobbes sees them. For Rousseau human beings are
more valuable moral beings than Hobbes permits them to be (for Hobbes security
is clearly more important than moral virtue), and to live a full life they must
realize their full potential as moral beings—they can do this only if they are fully
in charge of their own lives, free to make decisions about everything that
affects them. For Rousseau a human being is not fully human in Hobbes' world
because too much of his life is controlled from outside—he is oppressed by the Sovereign, who
controls much his life, and he is committed to mere acquisition of money and
goods. This, for Rousseau, is a contemptible life.

Finally, and
most importantly, Rousseau is also particularly concerned about psychological
freedom (something Hobbes doesn't even worry about). What does it matter how
much freedom I have if I don't feel happy, if I have no self-esteem, if I
am jealous of my neighbour, if I feel alienated, and so on. Hobbes doesn't worry
about this point: he assumes people will be happy increasing their commodious
living, and if they are not, well, too bad; they still have to obey the lawFor Rousseau, by contrast, psychological happiness is the
main issue. The major problem with society as it is is that it messes me up
psychologically, by creating in me all sorts of dissatisfactions, by making me
dependent on things out of my control, by taking away from me the power of
making decisions for myself. That is the oppression Rousseau sets out to
address.

What are some
of these things society uses to corrupt me? Well, the most important source of
corruption is people, who because they are richer, better looking, more
intelligent, braver than I am, make me unhappy with myself. They make me have a
poor self-esteem, they encourage in me a false pride, a competitiveness, what
Marx is later to call a false consciousness.

Society's
standards of taste and beauty, its emphasis on consumer goods and the idols of
the marketplace tempt me, create false unnecessary desires in me, make me
dependent on others. And this commodity corruption includes art, science,
theatre, music—most of those things which modern
society most prides itself on as "proof" of its progress. I don't
really need these, but they make me dependent upon them. Unlike most of the
philosophes, Rousseau is not convinced that knowledge would bring improvement—it can (and probably will) enslave me
just as much as can the king or the pope.

In this final
point, Rousseau is making a very profound challenge to society. Note the
deliberately abrupt and challenging emphasis of the opening sentence of Emile:

God makes
all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.

Knowledge
provided by society creates desires, which I may not be able to fulfill—and that can make me unhappy;
technology makes tools and machines which I cannot understand—this makes me dependent; art and
fiction create illusions which make me unhappy with my present situation.
The market place works to make me feel inadequate, especially in comparison with
others.

Modern
bourgeois society, as Rousseau sees it, is a conspiracy to prevent me from
attaining my full human potential and maturity, because it prevents me from
getting full control over myself. Modern society thus for Rousseau is the source
of our problems, and if we want to regain the goodness which nature gives us, we
must reshape society.

And what are
those goods which nature gives us and which modern society prevents us from
developing? Nature makes us free; nature makes us independent (our desires match
our ability to satisfy them); nature does not corrupt our natural sympathies for
other creatures. Natural man is not troubled by illusions or a false sense of
himself. In Rousseau's language, natural man is free to develop his self-love,
his amour de soi, without developing selfishness and vanity (amour-propre).

Society, on
the other hand, corrupts our healthy love of self into selfishness, filling us
with pride, vanity, and feelings of aggression and competitiveness. Unlike
Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau does not see this pride and competitiveness as
something which can be harnessed for beneficial purposes; for Rousseau, amour
propre prevents human beings from developing as they should if they are to
be fully human.

Reforming
Society: Rousseau's Recommendations

So how is one
to counter these pernicious effects of society? Rousseau's answer in Emile and
other writings is original, influential, and (in many people's eyes) unworkable.
It goes something like this:

Human beings
are naturally good—with an inborn love of themselves
(self-love) and a compassion for others. In nature their desires do not exceed
their capacity to fulfill those desires, and so they are happy. Nature
provides for them and does not fill them with tempting and corrupting illusions.
In this arrangement human beings are free, equal, and happy. Such a vision of
"natural man" obviously differs from Hobbes's picture of life in a
condition of natural freedom as "nasty, brutish, and short." In
Rousseau's state of nature, human beings are also, most importantly,
independent, since they do not rely upon anyone else to satisfy their physical
and psychological wants.

Society
corrupts this state of nature (the Noble Savage) in two main ways: first, it
creates the laws of property, which are the basis of all inequality. Some
human beings end up owning more and having more power than others (thus arise
all distinctions of rank and hereditary privilege); hence, physical freedom is
unnecessarily restricted. In addition, society creates all sorts of unnatural
desires—for fame, wealth, position, power, thus
perverting nature. Particularly pernicious is the development of desires which
the human being cannot by himself fulfill (through books, imagination, and
knowledge). This develops in human beings amour-propre (pride, love of
flaunting oneself in relation to others) and its opposite, feelings of
inadequacy in comparison with others.

Human beings
must live in a society--there is no resolving this problem by a return to a
state of nature. Hence, for Rousseau, the problem for the political thinker is
to restore to social man a freedom, independence, equality, and happiness
equivalent to that in a state of nature. We cannot solve the problem, Rousseau
stresses, by simply training a child naturally, in nature. We must take society
into account.

The key to
such restoration is a completely new, thorough, and continuing commitment to
education. We must educate human beings to bring out their natural
goodness, independence, self-love, compassion, and equality. We must begin
immediately, treating children as children (not little adults), acknowledging
the stages through which they go, and adjusting their education to what the
children are capable of at the various levels.

At all stages
of education the children must never desire what they cannot themselves provide
in their immediate environment. They must be protected against the seductive
illusions of society—books, plays, social roles, imaginative
speculation—anything that might lead them into
realms of dependence. The way to do this is to keep them busy with practical
projects and constant exercise and away from interaction with people, unless
those people are carefully rehearsed players in a planned environment.

True
happiness consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our
powers, in establishing a perfect equilibrium between the power and the will.
(52)

Children must
be raised in the consciousness of perfect freedom—they must think they are being allowed
to do what they want. The task for the education is to create situations where
they can do this properly (i.e., safely, with the appropriate desires, without
disruptive intrusions). The real test of the educator is not in telling
children what to do but seeing to it that their desires are suitably met by
their own actions in a constantly controlled environment (without the child
recognizing the human control constantly at work).

They must
experience all controls over them as one of two things: either natural law or
self-imposed restrictions. Restrictions which are laws of nature (i.e.,
universally binding on all as a condition of life, like the law of gravity) or
self-imposed restrictions are all right because they do not register as
limitations on my freedom (i.e., an arbitrary imposition on my liberty by some
other person). Hence, the child must learn always through direct experience,
never through lectures or commands or books. The world of the child must
be arranged as an all-inclusive laboratory, where the tutor is constantly
organizing (without the knowledge of the child) physical and social experiments
in which the child will learn from necessity the limits of his desires. He will
thus shape his desires to conform to necessity not to the dictates of another
person (which is oppression), without any sense that other human beings are
pushing him around.

This previous
point is extremely important in Rousseau (and in Wollstonecraft and Kant), and
it's vital to grasp, because it becomes a favorite way of reconciling human
freedom with the need for social rules. Basically it's a secular version of the
point made repeatedly in St. Paul: a freely undertaken conversion to Christ is
no loss of liberty (since it's freely chosen), even though it brings with it the
obligations to serve. Thus, a freely chosen commitment to reason places one's
actions under control. This cannot be oppression if the choice is made by the
individual and is not forced on the individual from outside (Wollstonecraft
invokes scripture in her description of this issue; referring to reason she uses
the phrase "Whose service is perfect freedom").

Thus all
education of the child must be through experience only. What the teacher
thinks the child should learn must be delivered to the child through a carefully
controlled experiment, which the child experiences as necessity, through acting
on his desires and capabilities. Other people will be brought into the
experiment as necessary, carefully coached to respond in the appropriate ways.
Thus, the child will never have to deal with any human authority other than
himself and will never have to consider the value of anything apart from its
immediate utility.

Keep the
child dependent on things only. (58)

. . . for
it is in man's nature to bear patiently with the nature of things, but not
with the ill-will of another. A child never rebels against "There is none
left," unless he thinks the reply is false. (65)

The child
will learn to exist independently of others as much as possible. He will
make whatever he needs to live. He will pursue an independent trade. He
will not waste his time in speculation or training his mind in any ways not
conducive to a useful, practical independence of the sort Robinson Crusoe had on
his island. Thus he will not need others. He will able to interact with
others politely, but he will not be tempted to play their social games, and he
will be largely indifferent to their demands

The child
must not be seduced by too much learning, too much imaginative literature or
art. The main rule is always to shape the education so that the child
desires only what he himself can provide. The best way to achieve this is
simply not to permit into the child's world the sorts of things which might
corrupt the experience. This is as true of people as of anything else.
He should develop an indifference towards people, which he will do if he has no
necessary relations with them.

Society,
Rousseau repeats constantly, is always bombarding the child with commands,
temptations, unnatural desires—hence, an important goal of the new
education is negative, just keeping society at bay, delaying the time when the
child will exist in the midst of society. He constantly stresses that the child
should be protected from such early contact, permitted to grow through the
stages which nature determined, so that a strong sense of independence can grow,
before the child has to enter society. In fact, as he states repeatedly, the
important point is negative—whatever particular exercises one
arranges for the child, the really important thing is not to involve the child
in potentially corrupting situations and relationships.

This makes
the selection of a trade important. A marketable trade which does not
undermine one's independence is far more important than developing a talent
which makes you dependent (hence a carpenter is much more to be valued than a
jeweler or a lace maker). Knowledge which does not contribute to the
development of a trade which will make one independent is wasted and dangerous
(because it fosters illusions or is impractical). One needs exact practical
knowledge that is directly relevant to living one's life as independently of
others as possible. Anything beyond that is unnecessary and risky.

This is, in
many ways, a far cry from the Homeric and Platonic call to excellence, to
develop as fully as possible one's arete. For Rousseau this vision
of life is unsatisfying because it creates desires in us which we cannot
satisfy. It is much better to be mediocre and happy than to chance unhappiness
by launching into areas where we compromise our independence (this emphasis has
led one writer to call Rousseau the "Homer of the losers"). Rousseau
knows there are no absolutes to be learned (no exit from the cave), so the best
preparation for life is to be trained to take care of oneself in a morally
responsible way, answerable to one's rational conscience, not to the fashions of
society.

The highest
goal of this education will be the mature human being who has willingly
committed himself to follow the rules of reason, not because he has been forced
to do so, but because he has come through his own efforts to accept reason as
the best guide. He will be fully developed morally because he will be
conscious of himself as a fully independent being, responsible for his own
actions, wholly independent of others, yet able to interact with them and
committed to guiding his life by reason. As much as possible he will be
invulnerable to the corruption of modern bourgeois society (note the importance
of the reference to the river Styx analogy right at the start and the
frontispiece).

This morally
autonomous human being will not require the social rituals of traditional living
because he has become fully conscious of himself as a rational, responsible
creature who can make decisions without reference to the emotional mysteries of
ritual, who will do his duty, but in doing it will experience no loss of freedom
because he recognizes that his duty is something which he has chosen. With this
equipment he will be able to move from community to community, from one social
group to another, without losing a sense of himself or feeling alienated and
rootless.

The greatest
single danger to this program is passion, especially sexual passion, because
it's hard to reconcile the desire for perfect independence and autonomy with the
complex interdependence which lasting sexual relationships require; and in Book
V, which we will be studying next week, Rousseau addresses this issue in a
complex, interesting, and for many people exceedingly offensive way (the subject
of my next lecture).

Let me
anticipate some objections. Is this entire system not brainwashing? Isn't
Rousseau asking us to formulate the mind of the child and young adult with
deceitful means—by hidden persuasion to mold it to fit
a certain end product? Well, yes, of course. But for Rousseau society has
so corrupted the natural quality of human beings that we have to do something to
save it. In acting the way he does, the Tutor is reinforcing the natural
Emile, letting him grow before society can corrupt him totally. The entire
educational program is designed to permit and encourage nature to take its
course, so that Emile can resist the corruptions of society once he has to deal
with it.

The only
protection against the invidious effects of society is a well-developed
individual independence and sturdy sense of self before one enters bourgeois
society (something of a reversal of our order, where we stress in elementary
education the socialization of the child and then, in secondary and
post-secondary education, shift attention to the development of individuality).

This program
raises all sorts of doubts about what it means to be "natural." For
Rousseau it clearly means independence, self-control, equality, and autonomy—and if the price of developing those
qualities is many of the things civilization most prides itself on (e.g.,
knowledge, books, works of imagination, fancy social functions, rank,
competitive excellence, and so on) then so be it. Since human beings
themselves are a considerable threat to anyone's independence, then even human
relationships have to be held at a distance. Better to keep that distance than
to run the risk of premature dependence.

How are we to
take all this? Is this a serious educational program? If so, how can one ever
implement it, except for a very few people. If not, then what is it purpose?

First of all,
interpreted as a book about education, Emile is full of enormously rich
suggestions—especially about the psychology of
children and the treatment appropriate to it. Even if one doesn't buy into the
entire program, there is a wealth of detail here for all sorts of practical (and
very influential) styles in teaching. For Rousseau is clearly onto to something
important—that our mature sense of ourselves and
our ability to function as independent moral beings are decisively shaped by the
way we are treated as children. If we want moral independence in the adult, then
we had better attend carefully to the way every activity in the child's life
helps to shape the adult and to the ways in which the habits of adult society
may corrupt that development.

But he pushes
so hard in a particular direction in order to protect our sense of self, in
order to protect the growing child from any domination by others or any desire
to dominate over others, that Rousseau, in effect, proposes getting rid of the
others. Where Hobbes and Locke desired to exploit human beings' amour propre,
that is, their ability to compete with and surpass others or be spurred by envy
of others to greater efforts, Rousseau wants to prevent the emergence of amour
propre "by protecting the child from the experience of other human
wills more powerful than his own, at least until the child is old enough and
mature enough that this experience need not divide him in two, splitting
self-love into amour de soi and amour propre" (Alford). Nothing must
interfere with the child's ability to develop a firm sense of a fully
independent self.

Some have
argued that Rousseau's concern for independence amounts almost to an obsession:
he is prepared to sacrifice almost everything to achieve it: knowledge, art,
imaginative works, personal relationships, commodious living. What will be the
product of such a process? An independent mediocrity too busy building things
and exercising to think? However, for Rousseau the only way one can fully remain
independent and free is never to take the chance of becoming dependent.

Most of us,
on some level, can respond to this desire (secretly many of us dream of setting
up a small farm on the gulf islands, building our own house, growing our own
food, and dealing with others at arm's length, if at all—surrendering many of the
"benefits" of commodious living in the big city for a simpler,
hardier, more independent lifestyle). But what Rousseau seems to want in Emile
for some people looks like madness—no human interconnectedness, a mediocre
mind basking in its ability to control a life which is simple only because of a
deliberate attempt to keep everything elementary.

Still,
however one reads what Rousseau has to say about education, it's clear that he
is, in a sense, the founding father of what we nowadays call
"progressive" education—that attempt to protect children from
the oppressive dictates of society, to allow them to develop at their own rate
and through their own experiences at their own speed (often in an experimentally
controlled environment), so that they develop a sturdy sense of self-identity,
even if that means we give a much lower priority to knowledge, to the
acquisition of those values and skills which adults think are the most important
for them (note the present argument in Nanaimo over a "no fail" policy
in the schools and over uniforms in California).

But Rousseau
himself indicates in his letters that one shouldn't read Emile principally,
or perhaps even at all, as a manual on educational reform. It is that, of course—but it is also a very important
document exploring the nature of human beings and the value of certain human
activities, especially in contrast to the state of things in Rousseau's society.
The education of Emile thus becomes, among other things, an important rhetorical
means for attacking all sorts of things in 18th century society, particularly
the assumptions nearest and dearest to those who felt comfortable about the
growing power, wealth, and social prominence of the middle class (i.e., the
emerging and increasingly complacent bourgeois).

Like Plato's Republic
(which Rousseau admires with a passion) this book may well be intended not so
much as a practical program (even in part) so much as a thought experiment
designed to open people's eyes up to some of their favorite preconceptions about
themselves. And it is hard, after reading Emile, not to bring into one's
own society a sharpened sense of various ways in which the things we most strive
for or are most proud of owning or doing are precisely those things which most
limit us as moral beings. In an age where much of our lives is taken up with
machines we do not understand and cannot fix, with property and possessions far
in excess of what we really need, with a marketplace that tempts us into
consuming all sorts of things we probably don't even want and which damage our
health, with children whose dearest wishes are for vastly overpriced and
over-advertised crap consumer goods and mindless TV and video entertainment on
demand, all this in cities and provinces run by people we don't even know or
often understand (let alone believe in), amid a mountain of evidence that many
people are desperately unhappy and medically ill (through drugs, sexual
diseases, bad diets, cigarettes, alcohol, over-medication, and so on), a
condition we celebrate as liberty, there is some point to attending to a book
which insists that if we do not have full moral control over our lives, we are,
in a very real sense, unfulfilled, that the civilization we have created may
indeed be the major source of our psychological difficulties, and that there
might be some value in reconsidering our priorities—or at least thinking about just what we
mean by the pride we take in being a free and civilized people.

Lecture
on Emile, Book V

[Note
that this is the text of a lecture given in the Malaspina University-College
Liberal Studies Program in September 1996. References to Emile are to the
Everyman Edition, Translated by Barbara Foxley. This document below is in the
public domain, released October 1999]

Introduction

Today I want
to seek to do something rather challenging—to offer a defense of Rousseau's
treatment of women, as revealed in his treatment of Sophy's education in Book V
of Emile. Although anyone can find a number of interesting and
uncontroversial recommendations about the education of women in that Book (for
example, the importance of allowing them to exercise), I take it that Rousseau's
general position is to many people here profoundly unacceptable, resting as it
does on a pronounced sense that men and women must play very different roles in
society and in marriage and that woman's role requires her to take on an
apparently subservient position. And this, Rousseau asserts, is a law of nature.
Few stances could be better calculated to arouse instant and strong opposition
nowadays in some quarters than something like the following.

A woman's
education must therefore be planned in relation to man. To be pleasing in his
sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in
manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these
are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught
while she is young. The further we depart from this principle, the further we
shall be from our goal, and all our precepts will fail to secure her happiness
or our own. (393)

If I were to
recommend this position myself in class or a curriculum committee, I would
probably get into trouble these days. So I'm not necessarily seeking to defend
Rousseau's position uncritically, but I would like to explore it. After all, he
is an extremely intelligent and often very subtle thinker, passionately
committed to freedom, equality, and independence. Before dismissing him as an
incurable sexist, we might want to see what his reasons are. Why would such a
writer arrive at this position, so instantly unacceptable to so many people,
especially to women? We can try, if we like, to explain the matter away by
appeals to Rousseau's apparently complex psychology or his hypospastic penis.
But before doing that, we should at least see what grounds Rousseau has for
offering what to most of us appears such an unacceptable view of the
relationship between the sexes and the education of women.

The
Problems of Sexuality and Independence

Before
turning directly to Rousseau's text, I'd like to consider some general questions
about sexuality and social roles. We are going to be reading a number of
different approaches to this issue in the next two semesters. So let me put some
obvious questions on the table.

Anyone who
considers the relationships between men and women, either as they exist in
society or as they ought to exist, begins with two very obvious points. First,
in spite of many clear similarities, women are biologically different from men,
particularly in matters of sexuality, and second, men and women have
traditionally held different roles in our society and been subject to
significantly different treatment. To this we can add a very common third
observation, namely, that women's roles in society have in our culture long
placed them at a serious disadvantage when compared with men's roles (less
opportunity, lower pay, more physical abuse, much less favorable legal rights,
and so on). I take it those points are sufficiently obvious not to require
further discussion.

A initial key
question any intelligent analysis of the relations between the sexes has to face
concerns these obvious observations. Is the biological difference between men
and women sufficiently strong to justify different roles and treatment (if not
the ones which currently exist then others better attuned to the difference)? Or
is the biological difference, although real enough, far less important than the
obvious similarities between men and women? If the difference is the most
significant factor, then it would seem more justifiable that men and women
should be assigned different roles and perhaps even different treatment; if the
similarity is the most significant factor, then clearly the social roles,
responsibilities, and rights should be similar (and the traditionally inferior
status of women would be an obvious case of social oppression). We are dealing
here, in other words, with a classification problem, of the sort we will be
discussing in our Science seminars next week.

Now, I want
to stress this key initial issue of similarity or difference, because much of
one's own position on women's rights, duties, education, roles, and so forth is
going to flow naturally from one's initial stance on this question. Today, as we
shall see, the question is by no means unequivocally dealt with. It is a
source of much divisiveness within feminism itself.

The
traditional response to this question in European Christian culture for
centuries was that women were obviously distinct from men and had an inferior
status in many respects (especially in law, in education, in the Church). And
European literature is full of justifications, scientific, scriptural, and
otherwise, for this arrangement.

Nevertheless,
one should observe women's place was often greatly valued. As Simone de Beauvoir
mentions, in medieval times a woman had a position in the economic state of
things that was recognized as essential. The farm wife, for example, might not
enjoy the same family and community standing as her husband and sons, she might
have to serve them at table and have fewer legal rights, but no one questioned
the essential role she played in the basic economic unit—the farm family or the cottage
industry. In addition, of course, there were many particular areas that had been
regarded as the monopoly of women, especially in certain forms of medicine and
in midwifery and in the Catholic Church.

To say this
is not to deny that throughout medieval Christianity there existed a frequently
vicious misogyny which manifested itself in a horror that is still being
uncovered, the regular persecution of witches, or that the traditional treatment
of women as different and inferior was wholly endorsed by women. It is merely to
claim that, by and large, the relationship between the sexes in accordance with
traditional roles, rights, and opportunities seems to have been settled on the
basis that women were distinctly different from men, and this difference
justified their inferior status (except in certain literary conventions
idealizing certain women).

Rousseau's
Audience

Rousseau in Emile
is responding to something new—or, put more appropriately, something
old but long silenced—the demand that women be accorded equal
treatment with men, that traditional inequalities are against natural law,
something imposed by society which requires immediate reform.

This rising
cry for women's equal treatment in the eighteenth century we can link to the
arrival in growing numbers of a new social phenomenon, the middle-class
daughter, raised in a family that is reasonably affluent, often given an
education that makes the woman literate and sufficient leisure time to acquaint
herself with philosophy, fiction, and politics, and thus to educate herself in a
new way. We notice in this century an apparently growing number of articulate
and very intelligent young middle-class women who, in some ways, have no real
work to do in society except to wait around until their families can transfer
them to some man, in many cases a man less intelligent than themselves. They
have no valued place, no necessary role to fill.

What I'm
suggesting here is that we can with some confidence ascribe the growing
attention to women's issues—especially those relating to the
education of middle-class women and their unequal status—to the growing affluence of the
middle-class, which was producing a group of people with no recognized role in
society, other than to serve the interests of their families and their husbands
in ways that assisted the bourgeois financial arrangements linked to marriage.

For such
women, often, as I say, well educated, intelligent, and articulate, there was no
acceptable alternative to marriage, for formal education and entrance to the
professions were denied. The traditional economic roles of the wife did not
exist in the same way as in the past, at least in the middle class, where the
wife's sole function was often to produce legal children in large quantities
("an heir and a spare") and preside over the home. Many free-lance
occupations open to men, like the life of an artist or trader or soldier, were
closed to almost all middle-class women. The Protestant churches had removed the
various institutional roles offered to women through holy orders. Thus, there
was emerging an increasingly large group protesting that the possibilities which
their society offered to them were inherently limiting, unequal, and, in a word,
immoral.

One might
think that Rousseau, the great champion of independence and equality would be in
full agreement with this position. After all, no one cried out with more
passionate energy than he did against the existence of traditional injustices
dressing themselves up as laws of nature in order to sanction customary
hierarchies of authority or saw with greater clarity the way in which the
bourgeois family's commitment to consumer culture was handing the individual
over to oppressive forces. Again and again in Emile Rousseau reminds us
that Nature does not create Kings and Bishops, because in nature all men are
good, and all are equal. And he insists that we must keep the marketplace away
from the growing boy, at least until he has a strong enough sense of self to
cope with its attempts to take over his identity. So why does this line of
argument not apply also to Sophy? Why, if Emile is strenuously educated to exist
as independently as possible, is Sophy's education apparently aimed at making
her fully dependent?

I want to
suggest three reasons. The first two of these are relatively non-controversial,
and I suspect many people here will agree readily with Rousseau or, even if they
do not agree, will not find his position offensive. The source of our
difficulties with Rousseau's treatment of women stems from the third reason, and
even here, I suspect, some people might be objecting more to particular details
of Rousseau's program than to the substantial principle upon which it is based.

Point
One: Sexuality

The first
reason Rousseau takes the position he does is that Rousseau takes very seriously
the importance of human sexuality. For Rousseau, a fulfilling sexual
relationship is the necessary completion of a full and happy life. If Emile's
sexual education is not properly carried out, then the rest of his education
will be largely in vain. Rousseau, in other words, takes the power of human
sexuality very seriously indeed and insists that we have to take it into
account. Without it, Emile will not be a complete human being.

But this then
confronts him with a problem, one that we all are still wrestling with: How can
we make sexuality and the sexual relations between men and women compatible with
independence? If sexual love involves a serious commitment in answer to a very
genuine need which one cannot fulfill by oneself, then is it not by its very
nature a limit on my freedom and my independence? As Bob Dylan puts it,
"I'm watching the parade of liberty./ But as long as I love you I'm not
free."

For a
traditional understanding of sexuality, this question was not a problem, because
traditional society did not particularly value independence: the fulfilled life
was one lived in society in a network of relationships with people in one's
community, so that the most desirable life for men and women was a complex
interdependency, in which marriage was often a cornerstone. So whether one
married for love or for money or to satisfy the arrangements entered into by
one's parents, the issue was never one of sacrificing one's independence. As we
have witnessed in reading Aristotle's Ethics and Shakespeare's Tempest,
interdependence is the source of our identity and the highest values of a human
life. One achieved one's full adult identity through the marriage—and with that marriage one also
acquired an economic role and social value. Freedom from relationships with
others is incomprehensible, at least as a source of human values, except in
extraordinary cases of spiritual hermits. Hence, traditionally there was no
conflict between the fulfilled sexual life in marriage and one's independence.
When we discussed the Tempest, we considered the possibility that
Prospero's whole experiment may be designed principally to permit Miranda to
fall in love and get married, so that she can return to civilization and live a
fully interdependent life in society. The notion that she might be happier on
the island because she might remain more independent just doesn't arise.

Rousseau is,
of course, breaking decisively with that tradition. He wants Emile to be as
independent as possible. He will live in society but without compromising his
independence: he will be an observer, making his own life with his own hands,
and untroubled about social ambition and public opinion. But he will have
powerful sexual urges and a need for love which must be satisfied. How can these
be satisfied, without compromising Emile's most cherished independence?

Well, one way
Rousseau might deal with this problem is to trivialize sexuality, that is, to
make it simply a social fact, like any other, which Emile can deal with as he
deals with any other social demand—coolly, dispassionately, casually—without any sense of a personal
passionate attachment to a particular partner. Sexuality, in other words, might
very well be something which involves no sacrifice of independence because it
will have no personal lasting commitment. The lover will still stay firmly in
charge of his life. And sexuality is no particular threat to that because it is,
in the last analysis, not that important. This is the tack we are going to see
Wollstonecraft take in her lengthy response to Emile. And in our
society we have to a considerable extent through things like the Playboy ethic
and the increasing technology of sexual satisfactions (like Woody Allen's
Orgasmatron) tried to increase human independence by developing sexual
techniques and practices which encourage erotic gratification without any
compromise with our independence. Many of our most famous cultural heroes (like
the cowboy or the detective, for example, are characteristically without any
significant sexual commitment which might compromise their freedom to do what
they want—their occasional sexual partners tend
to be professionals in the trade or frequently exchanged).

Rousseau,
however, is unwilling to do that, because he senses that much of what is most
valuable in life requires love on a very personal level. Hence, Emile will be
incomplete unless he is educated for the proper sexual life and unless his
sexual partner, Sophy, is also educated in a way that will foster significant
and lasting sexual commitment.

Point
Two: The Importance of the Family

The second
important formative principle in Rousseau's analysis of the sexes is his strong
insistence that the very basis of a moral society is a nuclear family—a husband and wife charged with the
responsibility of creating a home and raising children. This vision of the
family brings with it the institutionalization of sexuality, the creation of a
lasting monogamous relationship fueled by love. Without this, Rousseau claims,
people will be unable to love anything else. For this reason, Rousseau cannot
recommend (as other Enlightenment figures did) that we treat the problems of
sexuality by free love or by temporary liaisons or by attacking the family unit
(one of the cornerstones of Marx's analysis of the problems of bourgeois
society).

This emphasis
on the importance of sexual love in the form of a lasting marriage prompts
Rousseau to disagree strongly with his great classical mentor, Plato:

[in
speaking of Plato's arrangements for wives in common] . . . but he has not
succeeded in meeting the real difficulty. . . . I refer to that subversion of
all the tenderest of our natural feelings, which he sacrificed to an
artificial sentiment which can only exist by their aid. Will the bonds of
convention hold firm without some foundation in nature? Can devotion to the
state exist apart from the love of those near and dear to us? Can patriotism
thrive except in the soil of that miniature fatherland, the home? Is it not
the good son, the good husband, the good father, who makes the good citizen?
(390)

Now, I take
it that many people in this room might well agree with these two principles or,
even if they are not fully in agreement with them, will recognize that they are
defensible positions. To argue that sexuality is an essential part of the good
life and that a happily fulfilled sexual life in a lasting marriage is the most
valuable form of erotic satisfaction and that the happy family is a cornerstone
of a healthy society is a position strongly held by many people today, men and
women.

Point
Three: The Differences between the Sexes

The third
reason Rousseau analyzes the sexes the way he does is the source of many of our
arguments with his position. For he is strongly persuaded that there is a
fundamental difference between the sexes. His argument rests, not on appeals to
traditional scripture or law (although he does make at least one very nasty
reference to the Fall), but on his own observations and his own understanding of
modern science (and Rousseau had done some work in science), by an appeal to
nature. He is aware of the similarities, but he is more impressed with the
differences:

Yet where
sex is concerned man and woman are unlike; each is the complement of the
other; the difficulty in comparing them lies in our inability to decide, in
either case, what is a matter of sex, and what is not. General differences
present themselves to the comparative anatomist and even to the superficial
observer; they seem not to be a matter of sex; yet they are really sex
differences, though the connection eludes our observation. How far such
differences may extend we cannot tell; all we know for certain is that where
man and woman are alike we have to do with the characteristics of the species;
where they are unlike, we have to do with the characteristic of sex.
Considered from these two standpoints, we find so many instances of likeness
and unlikeness that it is perhaps one of the greatest of marvels how nature
has contrived to make two beings so like and yet do different. These
resemblances and differences must have an influence on the moral nature; this
inference is obvious, and it is confirmed by experience; it shows the vanity
of the disputes as to the superiority or the equality of the sexes; as if each
sex, pursing the path marked out for it by nature, were not more perfect in
that very divergence than if it more closely resembled the other. (384-5)

His treatment
of Sophy and her education follows naturally enough from this observation. If we
accept that there are significant differences and that these differences include
man's and woman's moral nature, then it seems logical enough that they should be
treated differently. Here again, this stance is not without many defenders
today, even among feminists. Those who, for example, argue that women's
educational requirements are different from men's (e.g., Women's Ways of
Knowing) or that women deal with moral issues in a manner different from men
(e.g., In a Different Voice) or that women conceptualize scientific
issues in ways often significantly different from men, and so on, are adopting a
position in many ways similar to Rousseau's initial assumptions.

I want to
stress this point, because one has to be careful in dealing with Rousseau's
analysis of Sophy's education to distinguish between the principles underlying
Rousseau's argument and the particular details he describes. If one subscribes
to the three principles I have outlined—the crucial importance of sexuality,
the primacy of the nuclear family, and the fundamental differences between men
and women—then it seems to me one's argument with
Rousseau is over sometimes relatively minor details. One has already conceded
that his position is basically on the right track.

Sophy's
Education: The Case for Rousseau

Let's assume
for a moment that we are in agreement with these three principles and examine
some of the details of Sophy's education. In spite of his reputation as an
incurable sexist, in some passages Rousseau displays a great sympathy for the
social problems women face. Like men, they have urgent desires, but unlike men,
they have far less freedom to meet those desires, and the price of making a
mistake is far greater for women than for men.

Has not a
woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known?
Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her
legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. (417)

We recognize
this same problem, and we insist on reforming society to provide women more
freedom, so that they can move towards a condition of enjoying the same freedom
as men. Just how much we have succeeded is something we might like to debate.
Rousseau's recommendation for Sophy is consistent with the basic principle of
his education for Emile: Sophy must be educated to deal with this situation, so
that she does not experience the psychological conflict of thwarted desires. So
if her situation demands a secret social code, a special form of coquetry, a
complex ritual of courtship, and so on, then Sophy must learn to deal with that
appropriately. This is an important point which illustrates the limits of
Rousseau's (and other eighteenth century reformers') impulses to recast society.
His sense of the tribulations society imposes on Sophy does not lead him to
propose revolutionary changes in that society. The changes must come in one's
attitude to those tribulations.

We might
concede that this is useful advice on this point. But Rousseau's extension of
this principle of educating Sophy so that potential oppression does not bother
her becomes much harder to accept when Rousseau turns his attention to the best
relationship between women and men, when he insists that women must be educated
to put up with the inadequacies of men and to make men's life more pleasant:

A woman's
education must therefore be planned in relation to man. To be pleasing in his
sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in
manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these
are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught
while she is young. The further we depart from this principle, the further we
shall be from our goal, and all our precepts will fail to secure her happiness
or our own. (393)

This is
surely hard to accept. Still, one might make the case that Rousseau is here
acknowledging that women are in some areas better than men. They should be
educated to use these talents well, so that their abilities in the marriage
complement the man's, and together they fulfill each other's needs. This,
Rousseau states many times, gives her, in effect, the real control in the
relationship. Apparently subservient, she must be educated so that she can
control Emile in subtle ways, without his realizing it. In this way, he and the
marriage will become better through her guidance but without compromising his
independence because he will not be aware of any form of control exercised over
him.

It's
important to notice that for Rousseau preserving the marriage is vital to the
emotional health of the couple and to the well being of society. But how can a
marriage last without creating in Emile a sense of limitation on his freedom,
his independence? Surely marriage by definition is a serious limit on
independence? So what is there to keep Emile from simply wandering off,
preserving his independence at the expense of his wife and children? To this key
question, Rousseau has a clear answer: Sophy must be educated to persuade Emile
to remain in the family (without his being aware that she is doing that).

I take it
many of us will find this objectionable. But let's look at this a bit more
closely before dismissing it out of hand. For Rousseau here is doing something
very interesting. He is, I think, acknowledging a common psychological truth,
that the happiness of a couple requires the woman to educate the man in ways
that do not threaten the male sense of independence. Many of us will, I think,
attest to the fact that that is in reality what does happen, even if we are not
prepared to concede Rousseau's point that it ought to happen, that it is a Law
of Nature, an unalterable condition of the world.

Take, for
example, the matter of sex. It strikes me from my own experience that in their
formal education in school and in their socialization through the peer group,
the media, and elsewhere, men are often given an understanding of sexual
activity that is hopelessly wrong, both about the sexual life most appropriate
for them and, even more hopelessly wrong, about the sexuality of women. What men
learn about truly loving sexuality they learn from women, often from their
wives.

But this is
no easy task. For men often have very fragile egos, especially where sex is
concerned, and furthermore their egos are intimately associated with their
sexual abilities and their urge to violence. So educating them is both essential
for a loving marriage but also fraught with risk, both for the woman personally
and for the relationship. Hence, the achievement of a properly fulfilling and
lasting sexual life within marriage often requires an intelligent, sensitive,
and complex control of the male without his being aware that he is in any way no
longer totally in charge. Of course, here I'm generalizing from my own
experience, but from what little I've read about the issue, my experience is not
uncommon.

If this is
the case, then Rousseau's point that women ought to be educated to carry out
such duties carries some weight. If, in fact, men react differently to
experience than women, for example in sexual experience, and if they need to
learn a more intelligent, sensitive, and cooperative approach without any
sacrifice of their masculine independence, something essential to their
self-worth, then who is to teach them, if not their wives? And if that is to be
a task of the wife, should she not be prepared for it, educated to know how to
deal with men, who, no matter how well prepared for life, are going to be
constitutionally unable to abandon certain male mental characteristics unless
they get help?

I think it is
important to stress the point that Rousseau does not expect Sophy simply to be
the passive recipient of her husband's directions and judgments (although one
can isolate a number of remarks which suggest that that is his entire position).
If he thought that, then educating Sophy would be comparatively easy. No. She
must play an active and guiding part in the relationship, but she must do this
duplicitously in order to protect Emile's sense of himself. Her sense of herself
will come through the feeling of accomplishment in the success of the marriage.

We may not
agree with this, but I think we ought at least to consider Rousseau's analysis
as having considerable psychological insight into the nature of sexual
relations. Of course, he is writing very close to his own experience, and there
may indeed be a certain amount of wish fulfillment in his recommendations. But
that does not mean that what he says is not worth serious consideration. And to
disagree with Rousseau cogently is going to require one to reflect long and hard
on some very fundamental questions.

This sense
that women are much more capable in certain ways of dealing with situations
which the married couple will face leads Rousseau again and again to warn the
reader against any tendency to make men and women the same. For if men and women
become essentially the same, then the mutual benefits they derive from each
other's company, especially sexuality, will not be realized and the entire
social fabric will be threatened.

The more
women are like men, the less influence they will have over men, and then men
will be masters indeed. (391)

If women
could discover principles and if men had a good heads for detail, they would
be mutually independent, they would live in perpetual strife, and there would
be an end to all society. (407)

These
opinions are profoundly at odds with modern liberal notions of gender equality.
But they should give us an occasion to reflect on the extent to which gender
equality, of the sort that Rousseau opposes, has led to personal and social
happiness in an age that worries about supermoms, staggering divorce rates,
single parent families, increasing rates of male impotence, violence against
women, and therapy everywhere. Rousseau's analysis would suggest that these
things are what we should expect if we try to make men and women the same.

Sophy's
Education: A Major Problem with Rousseau

In his
analysis of Sophy's education, Rousseau also confronts some important factors
which enormously complicate their lives, namely, how they are to deal with
society. Emile has been educated with a very strong sense of his independence
from society and with the equipment to withstand many of the dangers society
poses to his psychological freedom. Sophy, on the other hand, is much more
vulnerable.

For one
thing, the social constraints on women are much more severe than they are for
men, and women must be educated to deal with them. There are two main dangers
here. To rebel against society simply makes the woman more miserable and lessens
the chance that she and her husband will be happy. Sophy, who must be much more
skilled than Emile in the daily practical realities of life in society, must
make an accommodation with it.

On the other
hand, to accept uncritically the dictates of society will corrupt everything.
Rousseau is aware that society can tempt Sophy astray, particularly in matters
of taste and social style. Today we talk a great deal about The Beauty Myth and
the corruption of young girls' and women's minds by the commercial sellers of
beauty products and clothes (e.g., the statistics on adolescent anorexia and
bulimia). Rousseau is one of the first great modern thinkers to see this problem
and to warn us of it. The consumer culture can take over one's identity (we see
a good example of this in Middlemarch, in the character of Rosamond
Vincey). Thus, Sophy must have elegance and style, but she must not be a slave
to the current fads, to what Rousseau calls "conventional prejudice."

In order to
deal with "conventional prejudice" Sophy must be able to judge pubic
opinion. The logic of Rousseau's treatment leads him inexorably to this
conclusion. But this raises a problem which at once threatens a great deal of
what he is already said. This problem Wollstonecraft is going to exploit at
great length, because it is a major weakness in what Rousseau is saying.

Sophy can
only judge public opinion, that is, combat conventional prejudice, with reason.
As Rousseau observes: "It is, therefore, important to cultivate a faculty
which serves as judge between the two guides, which does not permit conscience
to go astray and corrects the errors of prejudice. That faculty is reason"
(413). But this creates a dilemma, as Rousseau himself recognizes. If women are
incapable of reasoning properly (as he suggests in places), then Sophy is
condemned to be the slave of public opinion and will be unable to be a suitable
wife for Emile. If, on the other hand, she is capable of reason, then she has
justification for being considered man's equal, and the fundamental differences
between the sexes, upon which Rousseau's analysis rests, begins to fall apart.

The one
possible way out of this problem, namely, that there are two forms of reason,
one for men and another for women, Rousseau flirts with (suggesting that women
have a more practical reasoning power and men a better capacity for systemic
generalizations), but as a dedicated Enlightenment thinker, he cannot commit
himself to that position. Reason exists in the singular only; thus, the paradox
remains. How is Sophy to function as a woman if she is not educated to think
properly, just as Emile has been educated?

Rousseau does
not evade this problem, but in dealing with it, he raises issues which lead one
to question what he has written elsewhere. Discussing how Sophy will in all her
behaviour bring honour to herself and her husband, Rousseau observes:

But how can
she set about this task if she is ignorant of our institutions, our customs,
our notions of propriety, if she knows nothing of the source of man's
judgment, nor the passions by which it is swayed? Since she depends both on
her own conscience and on public opinion, she must learn to know and reconcile
these two laws, and to put her own conscience first only when the two are
opposed to each other. She becomes the judge of her own judges, she decides
when she should obey and when she should refuse her obedience. She weighs
their prejudices before she accepts or rejects them; she learns to trace them
to their source, to foresee what they will be, and to turn them in her own
favour; she is careful never to give cause for blame if duty allows here to
avoid it. This cannot be properly done without cultivating her mind and
reason. (414)

This position
is eminently sensible: if Sophy has to discriminate constantly between
conflicting imperatives in order to carry out her duty as a virtuous wife, she
obviously should be educated to the task. And that means she must develop her
reason. Without that, she is going to be a mindless servant of the latest fads.
I find it hard to reconcile this observation with something like the following:

The search
for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms in science, for
all that tends to wide generalization, is beyond a woman's grasp; their
studies should be thoroughly practical. It is their business to apply the
principles discovered by men, it is their place to make the observations which
lead men to discover those principles. (418-419)

It is not
clear to me how women are to achieve what Rousseau expects them to without the
ability to reason independently, to make their own judgments based on an ability
to generalize. Hence, his often penetrating psychological understanding of women
seems distinctly at odds with the demands he makes of them. Out of this paradox,
Wollstonecraft is going to make a wedge to drive into the heart of Rousseau's
argument.

And
Wollstonecraft is right to do that. For it obviously makes no sense to demand of
women certain capabilities which one then denies them in their very make up or
in their education. Still, for all the obvious difficulties here, I think it is
worth attending to Rousseau's argument. For in the very process of his careful
and often very acute analysis, Rousseau exposes the problems we are still
wrestling with (listed here in no particular order):

First, is an
emphasis on gender similarity and equal treatment psychologically satisfying
(especially in sexual relations). Do we, in fact, foster love at all levels of
society by insisting on gender equality? If gender equality is a Law of Nature,
then why do so many women refuse to agree?

Second, what
are the laws of nature in relation to the two sexes? In educating the young
through a system committed to equality and similarity of treatment, are we
perhaps overlooking some important differences in the way men and women learn?
What might be some of the consequences of attending to these differences?

Third, just
how important is a fulfilled sexual life within the context of the nuclear
family? For Rousseau, this is the heart of the matter, and his education
of Sophy is one attempt to deal with the issue. Of course, there are
alternative strategies. One is to dismiss his concern and insist (as
Wollstonecraft does) that sexual passion should not be a major priority in
family relationships. Another is to insist that the family should not be
treated as the core unit of society, and we should make it a great deal easier,
as we have done, for women and men and children simply to opt out of famly life,
in the name of freedom and independence and equality. We are only too
aware of some of the social problems we create by adopting either of these
courses as a major way of dealing with what we have come to recognize as one of
our most important problems, the dysfuncitonal family (the source of so much
immediate and future social and personal misery).

And so on. We
don't have to endorse all or even any of Rousseau's argument in Book V of Emile
to derive important intellectual stimulation from it. It is one of those
texts that arouses a strong reaction and at the same time stretches one to
examine the basis for the counter-arguments one wants so urgently to make. Since
Wollstonecraft, in effect, launches the modern feminist movement by a direct
response to Emile, we can locate in Book V, as conveniently as anywhere
else, the start of an Enlightenment reform cause which we are still far from
sorting out to everyone's satisfaction.